Lessons Learned and What You Can Do

Lessons Learned and What You Can Do

Each of the four major sections of the Center's book Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability
— Food, the Campus, Community, and Teaching and Learning — concludes
with a list of eight to ten "Lessons Learned" from the experiences of
the Center and the schools profiled in the book, along with "What You
Can Do" suggestions.

See below for some examples based on those lists. For the complete lists, see Smart by Nature.

See also "Five Steps to Becoming Smart by Nature" in the CHANGE section of our website.

FOOD

Lessons Learned from Food Systems Efforts

• Take the long view. Changing food systems structures and practices will probably take at least three years.
• Share the effort. A teacher shouldn't be expected to oversee the garden —
scheduling, maintenance, and so on, on top of a full-time teaching load.
Freeing someone (it could be a reliable volunteer) from other
responsibilities improves the chances that the garden will continue
after the initial enthusiasm wears off. Someone needs to maintain the
garden during weekends or school breaks.• Get to know your audience. Food service success
depends on responding to "customers'" desires and preferences. Offering
taste tests before introducing new menu items is crucial.

What You Can Do

• Read your district's wellness policy. Does it reflect your beliefs and
hopes? If you have concerns about school food, who else (parents,
students, teachers, nurses, administrators, board members, health or
waste management agencies, civic organizations) shares them? Agree to
work together.
• Meet with the district's food service director. Ask what you can
do to help. Be persistent. Be polite. Listen, but be clear that you're
not going away.
• Rethink the school day. Imagine a schedule with recess before lunch, adequate time to eat lunch, and quiet time after lunch.

CAMPUS

Lessons Learned from Campus Practices

• Language matters. Some audiences who find sustainability too
distant a concept can be reached by talking about health, student
performance, savings, or whatever addresses their deepest desires and
concerns.
• Raise money the easy way. The easiest money to "raise" for campus greening is the money
that's not spent. Address energy and resource conservation before
looking for technological solutions.
• Fun is good. Games, competitions, and celebrations often work where moral suasion and invocations of responsibility don't.

What You Can Do

• Ask "What are we already doing?" Do an audit of your current sustainability practices. How can you build on that? What more do you want to
do?
• Look for nature in your own backyard. Find the places, even if they're small, where nature is present on
your campus. Get out of the classroom and into those places. Then make
more of them.
• Think of your buildings as teaching tools. Involve teachers early in the planning process and design new or
renovated campuses around what you want to teach and what kind of
community you want to be.

COMMUNITY

Lessons Learned from Community Practices

• Create a big tent. The more of the school community that participates in decision-making
and sustainability initiates, the more successful they will be.
• Identify your neighborhood allies. Organizations in the community surrounding the school (for
instance, the farmers' market, the local food co-op, or community
service agencies) are often willing to work with schools, but teachers
may not have time to contact them. A volunteer or a partner institution
can play an important role by making these connections.
• Expect to be surprised. Institutional change has its own dynamics, and there will always be surprises.

What You Can Do

• Appoint a sustainability coordinator. If possible, free a staff person from some responsibilities to concentrate on
coordinating your efforts.• Collaborate. Work together on
sustainability efforts with other schools in your area. For example,
purchasing cooperatively, organize speakers' bureaus, share resource
databases, and join forces on projects.
• Use your community as a sustainability laboratory. Brainstorm with students about the indicators of the quality of life
in communities. Then compare a local neighborhood with those indicators
and ask what changes would make the biggest differences.

TEACHING AND LEARNING

Lessons Learned from Teaching and Learning

• Teaching through an environmental framework boosts test scores.
• Engage students. If teachers focus on the bad news about the environment, students
close down. Giving students an opportunity to do something positive can
keep students and teachers inspired.
• Sustainability is a perspective, not another new topic. Many of the ideas central to sustainability education are already being taught, without being named as such.

What You Can Do

• Start with your current efforts. Begin by identifying what you are already doing that fits with schooling for sustainability and build on that foundation.
• Give students concrete opportunities to make a difference. Help them create projects in which they do something useful, such as
measuring the water quality of a local stream and presenting it to local
officials who will use.
• Trust your instincts and invest in networks of relationships. Sustainability is, after all, a community practice.

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About the Author

Michael K. Stone

Michael K. Stone is senior editor at the Center for Ecoliteracy (www.ecoliteracy.org) and the primary author of the Center's book, Smart by Nature: Schooling for Sustainability (Watershed Media, 2009) and Ecological Literacy: Educating Our Children for a Sustainable World (Sierra Club Books, 2005). Prior to coming to the Center, Michael was managing editor of Whole Earth magazine and the Millennium Whole Earth Catalog; he has also written for the Toronto Star and The New York Times, among other publications.